The American Constitution has functioned and endured longer than any other written constitution of the modern era. It imbues the nation with energy to act while restraining its agents from acting improperly. It safeguards our liberties and establishes a government of laws, not of men and women. Above all, the Constitution is the mortar that binds the fifty-state edifice under the concept of federalism; it is the symbol that unifies nearly 250 million people of different origins, races, and religions into a single nation.

Over two centuries dozens of constitutions adopted in other countries have gone into the scrap heap. The United States Constitution has out- lived almost all its successors. The longevity of the Constitution makes us wonder whether its thirty-nine signers planned it that way, and if they did, why doesn’t the Constitution declare itself to be perpetual, unlike the weak “perpetual” union—the Articles of Confederation—that it succeeded? Somehow the adjective was overlooked in the federal convention, while the word compact was deliberately avoided in a vain attempt to forestall the issue of whether the Constitution was a compact between the states, which any party could disavow, or between the government and the people, which States’ Righters might have found unacceptable.

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